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Title: A Dynamic Analysis of Educational, Occupational, and Inter-Firm Mobility Decisions
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Sullivan, Paul Joseph
A Dynamic Analysis of Educational, Occupational, and Inter-Firm Mobility Decisions
Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2005. DAI-A 66/01, p. 287, Jul 2005
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)
Keyword(s): Educational Attainment; Heterogeneity; Human Capital; Labor Economics; Mobility, Occupational; Modeling; Wages

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This research examines educational attainment and mobility between firms and occupations using a dynamic structural model of career choices. The model expands on previous work by jointly modeling transitions between firms and occupations within a model of career choice. Incorporating mobility between firms and occupations within a unified model provides structural parameter estimates that indicate the relative importance of firm and occupation-specific factors in determining career choices. The estimates suggest that employment choices are driven jointly by firm-specific factors such as matching in wages and occupation-specific factors such as heterogeneity in skills and preferences for different types of work. The estimates also indicate that both firm and occupation-specific human capital play a role in determining wages. Individuals in the model choose when to attend school and when to move between firms and occupations. Transitions between firms and occupations are produced by the interaction of firm-specific match values, occupation-specific skill heterogeneity, human capital, and randomness in job offers and utility shocks. The parameters of the dynamic structural model are estimated with simulated maximum likelihood using data on individuals' educational and employment choices from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Estimation is computationally expensive because of the size of the state space and the inclusion of wage and non-pecuniary job matching in the model. These complications are addressed by using simulation and interpolation methods to solve the dynamic programming problem and by modeling human capital in a novel way that reduces the size of the state space. The structural parameter estimates confirm the significance of including firm-specific matching and human capital within a model of occupational choice. Differences in occupation-specific abilities across people are also shown to be a key determinant of occupational choices and wages. The estimates also indicate that preferences for the type of work done in each occupation play a large role in determining people's career choices. Counterfactual simulations show that the effect of preferences on occupational choices is large relative to the effect of variation in skills or schooling ability. Overall, the results suggest that educational and occupational choices are shaped by a complex pattern of comparative advantages in skills and preferences.
Bibliography Citation
Sullivan, Paul Joseph. A Dynamic Analysis of Educational, Occupational, and Inter-Firm Mobility Decisions. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2005. DAI-A 66/01, p. 287, Jul 2005.